|  | 3.4 | Benefits of VLANs
| 3.4.1 | How VLANs make additions, moves, and changes easier

Companies are continuously reorganizing. On average, 20% to 40% of the workforce physically moves every year. These moves, additions, and changes are one of a network manager's biggest headaches and one of the largest expenses related to managing the network. Many moves require recabling, and almost all moves require new station addressing and hub and router reconfigurations. VLANs provide an effective mechanism for controlling these changes and reducing much of the cost associated with hub and router reconfigurations. Users in a VLAN can share the same network address space (that is, the IP subnet), regardless of their location. When users in a VLAN are moved from one location to another, as long as they remain within the same VLAN and are connected to a switch port, their network addresses do not change. A location change can be as simple as plugging a user into a port on a VLAN-capable switch and configuring the port on the switch to that VLAN. VLANs are a significant improvement over the typical LAN-based techniques used in wiring closets because they require less rewiring, configuration, and debugging. Router configuration is left intact; a simple move for a user from one location to another does not create any configuration modifications in the router if the user stays in the same VLAN.
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| Troubleshooting LAN Switching Environments